It’s just weird to see what sick twisted bastards we were dealing with when the southern part of this country refused to acknowledge the moral bankruptcy of human bondage. James Loewen looks at five myths about why the South seceded from the Union. Here’s the first mythbusting:
1. The South seceded over states’ rights.
Confederate states did claim the right to secede, but no state claimed to be seceding for that right. In fact, Confederates opposed states’ rights — that is, the right of Northern states not to support slavery.
On Dec. 24, 1860, delegates at South Carolina’s secession convention adopted a “Declaration of the Immediate Causes Which Induce and Justify the Secession of South Carolina from the Federal Union.” It noted “an increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” and protested that Northern states had failed to “fulfill their constitutional obligations” by interfering with the return of fugitive slaves to bondage. Slavery, not states’ rights, birthed the Civil War.
South Carolina was further upset that New York no longer allowed “slavery transit.” In the past, if Charleston gentry wanted to spend August in the Hamptons, they could bring their cook along. No longer — and South Carolina’s delegates were outraged. In addition, they objected that New England states let black men vote and tolerated abolitionist societies. According to South Carolina, states should not have the right to let their citizens assemble and speak freely when what they said threatened slavery.
Other seceding states echoed South Carolina. “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery — the greatest material interest of the world,” proclaimed Mississippi in its own secession declaration, passed Jan. 9, 1861. “Its labor supplies the product which constitutes by far the largest and most important portions of the commerce of the earth. . . . A blow at slavery is a blow at commerce and civilization.”
And then you have people like Trent Lott palling around with White Citizens Councils and telling us its a shame that Strom Thurmond wasn’t elected president on his Jim Crow-forever platform. Haley Barbour tells us that the civil rights era in Mississippi wasn’t that big of a deal.
I’m sorry. You have to make a clean break with your past. If you cling to it, you are beyond contempt.
Do you ever wonder what our country would be like if Richard Nixon hadn’t been such a son of a bitch? What would the GOP look like today if Nixon had been too decent to pursue a Southern Strategy? How much depends on the willingness or unwillingness of public figures to stoke and exploit hatred?
